Welfare Reform Bill

I apologise to the Committee for being absent at the very start of the debate, but I am also involved in the debate on the Iraq invasion. My reason for putting my name to the amendment is very much linked with remarks I made at Second Reading of the Policing and Crime Bill. That may sound slightly strange, but there I drew attention to the fact that at present the House is faced with an enormous number of different Bills, each with an impact assessment attached. I wonder whether anyone has bothered to do an impact assessment of the impact of any one of these Bills on any of the other Bills. With this Bill, that issue comes very much to mind, for two entirely separate reasons. I declare an interest as an adviser to the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, which is embarked on two separate studies—one on the problem of mental health in prisons and the second on the problems faced by those with mental health problems, including learning disabilities, in getting employment. At the same time, in the apprenticeships Bill, a number of us are tabling an amendment to ensure that before starting school, every child is given a proper assessment of its learning abilities and disabilities to enable it to engage in education. In prisons, an enormous number of people lack the learning ability to engage in the system when they reach the age of 15. We find that in Northern Ireland they have decided that every child should be assessed at the age of two to ensure that the sort of learning difficulty being discussed under this amendment is raised at an early enough stage for something to be done about it. Therefore, I voice my concern and my strong support for the noble Lord, Lord Rix, and the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, in every word that they said. There seems to be a disconnect; on one hand, we have an enormous number of efforts being made to improve what is happening for the identification of learning skills problems and learning disabilities and to do something to harness them; on the other hand, we are proposing that something should be done, if, for reasons perfectly explicable in the context of the disability, the disabled person cannot meet the conditions proposed in the Bill.